Track bounced back emails (bounce rate)

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Definition and causes of bounces

A bounce (or bounced email) refers to the situation where your email is rejected by your subscriber's email server.

Specifically, your email cannot be delivered to your recipients, and is returned to your inbox with an error message which looks like this:

Two types of bounces characterize this email delivery failure:

• • Soft bounce: This is a temporary issue. The reasons are the following:

    • Your recipients' mailbox and/or your own inbox are full

    • Your email message is too large and too heavy

    • Your recipients' email server is down or offline

    • A connection timeout occurred when Gmail tried to deliver your email

  • Hard bounce: This is a permanent issue. The reasons are the following:

    • Your recipients' email address does not exist (anymore)

    • The domains do not exist (anymore)

    • Your recipients' email server has completely blocked email deliveries

Consult our other article to learn more about bounces and delivery failures.

What does 'BOUNCED' mean?

After activating our tracking tool, every time an email bounces back to your Gmail inbox, the mention in the 'Merge status' column of your spreadsheet will turn from 'EMAIL_SENT' into 'BOUNCED':

This notification will be useful for you to track your bounce rate, and monitor your future campaigns in order to get the lowest bounce rate possible and have your emails correctly delivered.

How to reduce bounce rate and rejected emails?

In general, a high bounce rate means that your recipient list has become obsolete. For example, your contacts might have not been properly imported, with many mistakes in their email addresses or accounts that did not exist anymore.

Besides, bounces also occur when you are sending emails to people who never subscribed to your list (e.g.: For prospection). In other words, this is related to spamming. You have to comply with Google guidelines for bulk senders: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en

In order to reduce your bounce rate, here are a few tips that we highly recommend to follow:

• • Ensure that your contacts opted-in to your emailing campaigns

  • Never send big batch of emails to people who don't know who you are

  • Use double opt-in techniques such as sign-up forms, confirmation emails etc. The purpose is to make sure that your recipients validated their email address

  • Include an unsubscribe link to your emails (mandatory for newsletters)

If none of these situations applies to you, you might have troubles with your own Google Apps domain, specifically with your SPF record. Check out this article to learn more about SPF record, and follow the instructions to find solutions to your spam issues (not for Gmail accounts).